Thinking inside the boxThinking inside the boxGoogle Summer of Code 2008 projects are up- March 18, 2008 For the past few years, Google has been running their Summer of Code events where Google offers $5000 for college students who are asked to code for a summer for the benefit of various Open Source efforts. And just like in 2006 and 2007, I put up proposals and offered to act as a mentor. The first one is up at both Debian and R: an opportunity to help with the ongoing efforts of 'turning more CRAN package into Debian packages'. The second one is only at the R page: a proposal to fill the...http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2008/03/17#gsoc_2008_opened 2008 March Madness Half Marathon in Cary- March 18, 2008 Yesterday was the annual March Madness Half Marathon in Cary, IL -- and this year marked the 30th anniversary of the race. The race is getting more and more popular as the start to the running season, and an early race for those in Spring marathon training. This year, and it had sold out in a matter of days. As for the race, I wasn't running it all that well. My legs already felt heavy when I was doing a casual four-miler the day before with our local running group. Similarly, I didn't feel..http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2008/03/17#march_madness_half_2008 SFJAZZ Collective at CSO- March 16, 2008 Went to the CSO yesterday as a nice way to end a frantic workweek: first a beer or two after work, and then off for some Jazz. Yesterday's program was the SFJAZZ Collective: eight individuals, all noted in their own right, coming together for a few weeks each year to play as an ensemble. The program generally consists of two halfes: one with material by a modern composer -- Wayne Shorter is this year's pick -- and new original compositions by the band members. This was a special treat as...http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2008/03/15#sfjazz_collective_mar2008 PGApack 1.1: Almost as good as new- March 11, 2008 PGAPack is rather nice and fairly small library for 'parallel' optimisation via generic algorithms using the MPI message passing protocol. PGAPack 1.0 was written by David Levine while doing graduate work during the mid-1990s at Argonne Labs University of Chicago. PGAPack has also been in or around Debian for a rather long time, but it suffered from benign neglect in the last few years. Some of this came to the fore in this bugreport which lead to my offer to the then-maintainer Andreas...http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2008/03/10#pgapack_1_1 |